An ongoing frustration of those who would like to organize help on a big scale has been that while it is possible to reach millions of homes via television, it has been almost impossible to capture the full public response by the many people who would like to help victims of a major calamity or of an affliction of great public concern. Despite the existence of some interactive television systems, mass media capable of reaching millions of people simultaneously essentially are of a one-way nature. The existence of nationwide and transcontinental telephone systems may have created the illusion that the telephone can easily provide a return path, in parallel to any one-way mass medium, for all those who want to respond to a plea for help or to other broadcast material. That impression may be fortified by the frequent occurrence of promotional television programs in which viewers are prompted by the display of a phone number to respond to a broadcast through their telephone sets. However, those who are using that approach have come to know that it by no means provides a two-way street, but only a limited path backwards in response to an immense current forward.
In this respect, researchers in the promotional broadcast field have come to know that most viewers who want to respond by telephone will attempt to do so within less than two minutes after a broadcast stimulus therefor. By way of representative example, over eighty-five percent of all such phone calls will be attempted during the first ninety seconds, followed by ten to fifteen percent within the next five minutes. After this period, the call volume for a given broadcast stimulus will virtually disappear. Prior-art phone systems have been incapable of accommodating within a couple of minutes the myriads of phone calls attempted by viewers in response to a widely broadcast prompt or stimulus
Add to this the problem that only a minority will attempt to re-dial the broadcast phone number, when they receive a busy signal. In practice, the percentage of those who will attempt another call is dependent upon several variables which, as known in commercial promotion, include the perceived quality of the product or service, the competitive posture of the product or service from alternate channels of distribution and manufacturers, and the strength and duration of memory recall of the offer and the toll-free number broadcast. By way of representative example, applicable also to the telethon field, only some forty per cent of all callers will attempt to redial the broadcast phone number if they receive a busy signal. This percentage is halved each time the busy signal is again encountered, to disappear asymptotically with the fourth attempt to reach the busy phone number.
This means that many promotions for civic or charitable purposes either remained lofty goals without substantial return, or then had to be so hard hitting and repetitive as to become in effect a nuisance to many television viewers and radio listeners.
The same applies to the commercial arena, where commercial messages and advertisements have become so numerous as to annoy on the one hand and lose their efficacy on the other hand. This has called for a significant shift away from advertising in favor of promotion with value-added propositions. Such promotions have gone nationwide, but the effect has been like that of a giant rectifier: substantially all the current has flown one way, true to the nature of television and broadcast radio as a one-way mass medium, with very little current flowing the other way. As in a commercial rectifier, some current can flow the other way, and television viewers and radio listeners, indeed, have been able to use their telephones in pledging their charitable or other contributions, placing their orders, or otherwise responding to broadcast programs or promotions.
However, what is needed here is not a leaky rectifier, but a strong bi-directional or, nationwide, omni-directional system in which information generated by a broadcast promotion can flow back from the viewers and listeners' homes completely and instantaneously, rather than through prior-art bottlenecks caused by busy operators, phone systems inadequate to the task, and above all, an eventually unsuccessful attempt to produce a large-scale response system by multiplying a telephonic response methodology that for a long time worked reasonably well with local shops and other small-scale situations. However, as in other areas of technology, just doing "more of the same thing" has not solved the problem.
That the capability to do better exists may, for instance, be seen from the recent article by Gary Slutsker in FORBES MAGAZINE (Apr. 3, 1989, pp. 145-47) entitled Relationship Marketing, and describing in part ideas conceived by the subject inventors, and being herewith incorporated by reference herein.
The capability of public telephone systems to capture callers' phone numbers is at least as old as electronic dialing. In fact AT&T has had an automatic number identification system (ANI) for some time. Moreover, automatic telephone number dialing systems also have been known for some time. "Pay-per-view" TV systems not only have captured subscribers' telephone numbers, but have asked them at the same time by synthesized voice to key-in their choice through the pushbutton dialing facility now present at the majority of telephone sets.
Despite such capability and potentials, the reality of telemarketing has not been encouraging. As reported on Mar. 31, 1989 in the LOS ANGELES TIMES, Part IV, pp. 2 and 4, the leading mass merchandiser J. C. Penny announced its decision to "pull the plug" on Telaction, its interactive home shopping service that was being tested in the Chicago area. Telaction provided cable television viewers with an electronic shopping mall. Using a touch-tone telephone, viewers could choose a category of merchandise, browse the offerings from a particular store and make selections. An array of prestigious merchants participated in the service, including Neiman Marcus Group, Marshall Field's, Sears, catalogue house Spiegel Inc., Dayton Hudson, Galleries Lafayette of France, and La Rinascente of Italy.
Reported reasons for the adverse decision were an "innovative but cumbersome" technology with an unsatisfactory rate of return customers.
Neither of the two interactive systems reported in that LOS ANGELES TIMES article as remaining after Telaction closes, uses the "Touch Tone" telephone. Rather, a joint venture of Sears Roebuck and IBM, called "Prodigy," is activated by subscribers on personal computers.
GTE is also doing limited testing in Boston of an interactive service called "Main Street." Users access the service through a television cable using a remote control. Unlike Telaction, "Main Street" does not require a touch-tone phone and does not make subscribers share a party line.
In a different vein, recent systems that call on telephone subscribers en masse with various solicitations have been creating quite a nuisance, and there is a need to replace such unsolicited calling systems by systems which will not make calls unless the called party has in some manner indicated that such calls are authorized.